Academic painting

Academic painting

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 points

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Academic painting

• A kind of painting that respects all the rules dictated by the academies of the arts, the “guardians” of the artistic tradition who rigidly uphold the classical norms of representation.
• Let us bear in mind that the academies arose at a time where the subjectivity of the artists, their particular way of seeing the universe did not prevail yet. Artists represented “nature” (the world outside the artist, not his inner world). Hence, the conviction that art could be made from rules, formulas, conventions, in a professional way.
• Academicism painted that nature in an ideal way. It could not “stand” naturalistic realism. It considered that reality was full of ugliness that was not worth representing. Reynolds himself (author of the painting we have chosen, first president of the Royal Academy in London – a position he held until his death) argued that we should not “slavishly copy” nature, but rather that we should seek a generalized and ideal form.
• Artists did not discover the patterns of beauty from their direct experience, these were “dictated” in the halls of the Academy, and usually pleased the majority, they were classical ones. But if there is something that art teaches us, it is that life is beautiful in all its chaos and imperfections.
• So it was natural that academies became controversial. By imposing the canons of beauty, the rules to follow, “what the artist and the public should like”, they undermined creativity. So, unintentionally, they became “inspiration” for artists and entire movements that tried to destroy their conventions.

Representative artists:

In France: Bouguereau, Chaplin, Cabanel, Gérôme.
In Great Britain: Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence.

Imagen: Master Hare (1789). Joshua Reynolds.

Recommended links:

The Birth of Venus (1879) by Bouguereau.

Jean-Léon Gérôme and Diogenes.

Art in Classical Antiquity.

Renaissance.

When does Modern Art Start?

Postmodern art.

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